Where Codes Meet: On the Literary Uses of Iconic Signs

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L O O K i N G A WRY G R Z E G O R Z G R O C H O W S K I W H E R E C O D E S M E E T : ON T H E L I T E R A R Y U S E S . . 295

Grzegorz Grochowski

Where Codes Meet: On the Literary Uses of Iconic Signs

D O I :io .i8 3 i8 /t d .2 o i5 .e n .2 .i8

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Despite its solid grounding in the field of semiotically ori- ented poetics and its recent surge in popularity thanks to cognitive linguistics, the category o f iconicity is not a hom ogeneous one and, in the literature on literature, e n co m p asse s a variety o f in com m ensurable are as of problems.1 In the m ost traditional and perhaps somewhat o ld-fash ion ed view, iconicity is equated w ith im agery and with the capacity that w ords have to form illustrative im ages that stim ulate the sensibility of the receiver.2

1 Exam ples o f the growing interest in the phenom enon of iconicity, and a testim ony to the variety of w ays in w hich this category is un- derstood, can be found in the book series Iconicity in Lan guage and Literature (eds. Olga Ficher and Max Nanny, Form M im ing M eaning (Am sterdam , Philadelphia: Benjam ins, 1999); The M otivated Sign, eds. Olga Fischer and Max Nanny, (Am sterdam , Philadelphia: Ben

jam ins, 2001); From Sign to Singing, eds. W olfgang Muller and Olga Fisher (Am sterdam , Philadelphia: Benjam ins, 2003). For a discussion of various interpretations of the sam e term and a study of its cor- responding phenom ena by a Polish author, see Zofia M itosek, e.g.,

"Ikoniczność" and "Słowo ikoniczne?," in M im esis. Zjaw isko i problem (W arszawa: W ydaw nictw o Naukowe PWN, 1997).

2 See, for example, Zdzisław a Kopczyńska, "Malowanie słowami," in Język a po ezja (Wrocław: Zakład N arodow y im. O ssolińskich, 1976);

ed. Agnieszka M oraw ińska Słow o i obraz (W arszawa, 1982); Barbara

G rzegorz G ro cho w ski works in the Institute of Literary Studies at the Polish A cadem y of Sciences, doing research in the fields of poetics, genres and discourse. He is the author of a book on text hybrids and co-author of the dictionary of Cultural Studies. He is a m em ber of the editorial board of the journal "Teksty Drugie"

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Meanwhile, academics subscribing to the ideas of structuralism (am ong them Roman Jakobson, to nam e but one) em phasised the problem o f motivation in the poetic sign, analysing the artistic operations and strategies that lead to the transform ation of arbitrary sym bols into recognizable counterparts to extra- textual phenom ena.3 In the study o f literary communication, it is iconicity as m im etic form alism , understood as the “quotationality” o f statem en ts, that achieved the m ost privileged position.4 In this case, the subject of study was the relationship of likeness shared by given segm ents of a literary narrative and the textual m odels of certain utilitarian texts which they imitated. Finally, an issue that enjoys great interest, chiefly due to the influence of cognitivism, is the diagram m aticity of statem ents, analyzed in their m yriad aspects and different textual levels.5 It is this final matter, admittedly, that offers the m ost prom ising perspectives, as it applies to both utilitarian and artistic texts, is m anifested at the local and global levels (i.e. the syntax of a sentence and the overall com position o f the text), and encourages stu dies on em pirical linguistic data as well as reflections on the perception o f the receiver, and on the m echanism s by which one picks up various analogies and parallels.

W hile I appreciate the significance o f the above perspectives and w ish to state my particular sym pathy to the final view point, I would also like to p oin t out another issu e and exam ine one m ore p o ssib le approach to the ph en om en on o f icon icity in literature. I am referring n ot to the “iconic w ord,”6 in its variou s se n ses, b u t to the u se o f strictly iconic sig n s in lingu istic m essag es: in other w ords, the topic of iconicity in literature, rather the iconicity o f literature itself. The scope of this article will thus exclude

Sienkiew icz, "Literackie 'teorie w idzenia'” (Poznań, 1992); Sew eryna W ysłouch, "O malarskości literatury," in Literatura i sem iotyka (W arszawa: W ydaw nictw o Naukowe PW N, 2001).

3 Exam ples include the observations on the sym bolism of sounds and the m ulti-leveled m o

tivation of poetic signs form ulated in the sem inal work by Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Tw entieth-Century Literary Theory, ed. Ken New ton (London: M acm illan Education UK, 1997).

4 See, for example, Maria Renata Mayenowa, "Pojęcie w yrażenia cudzysłow ow ego a sy tu acja kom unikacyjna literatury," in Poetyka teoretyczna (Wrocław: O ssolineum , 1974); Janusz Lalew icz, "M im etyzm form alny i problem naśladow ania w kom unikacji literackiej," in Tekst i fabuła, eds. Czesław Niedzielski and Janusz Sław iński (Wrocław: O ssolineum , 1979); M ichał G łow iński, "M im esis językow a w w ypow iedzi literackiej," P am iętnik Literacki 4 (1980).

5 See, for example, Icon icity in Syntax, ed. John Haim an (Am sterdam , Philadelphia: Benjam ins, 1985); Anna Duszak, "Tekst naturalny," in Tekst, dyskurs, kom unikacja m iędzykulturow a (War- saw: W ydaw nictw o Naukowe PWN, 1998); Kognityw ne podstaw y języka i językoznaw stw a, ed.

Elżbieta Tabakowska (Kraków: U niversitas, 2001).

6 I borrow this term from the above-m entioned study by M itosek, "Słowo ikoniczne?"

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such crucial asp ects of the relationship betw een the verbal and the visual a s description, ekphrasis, in tersem io tic tran slation , the aesth eticisatio n o f the linguistic sign (as represented by carmina figurata and calligram s, for exam ple), and the textu al equivalisation o f the im age. I will n ot analyze situation s in which a piece of literature refers to a certain work of visual art as a them e, be it alluded to or explicitly nam ed. I w ould like to focus this study on u nits th at m ight be described, to u se a concept from the field of art history, as “sem antic enclaves” appearing in contem porary artistic texts.

M ieczysław Wallis, from whom I have borrowed this term, u ses it to describe

“such a part of a work of art that is com posed of sign s of a different type, or belonging to a different system , than the work as a whole,”7 and thus com - prises a certain relatively independent, complete constituent that follows its own rules and presen ts its own sem an tic potential. A s an exam ple of such a phenom enon, W allis m ention s verba visibilia, or w riting placed in paint- ings, from the banderoles bearing dialog or sententiae featured on Medieval can vases, to the inscription s p asted by Pablo P icasso and M ax Ernst onto their avant-garde collages. The analysis and com parison o f m any diverse exam ples dem onstrates the dynamic nature of the relationship betw een the im age and w ord in different eras, cultural form ation s, and artistic styles.

Depending on the tim e and place in which a particular work w as created, we observe a change in the form o f “quoting,” or the com bining of incom m ensurable sign s, the hierarchies governing the relation sh ips betw een codes, the ideological and aesthetic justification s for the use o f inscription s, and the functions ascribed to such sem an tic interjections.

I am, however, interested in the opposite situation, one that nevertheless refers to the relationship between the word and the image: namely, such works in which im ages — not in the sen se o f poetic vision s, rhetorical figures, or realist descriptions, but as literal drawings, m aps, or diagram s — are introduced into the literary text. The presence o f such visual elem ents in a book h as traditionally been asso ciated w ith the category o f illustration, which serves to facilitate the understanding of m essages conveyed through the use o f language; it is an ornam ent intended to increase the aesthetic attractive- n ess o f a given volume. In a sim ilar understanding, the im age is associated m ainly with popular publications, didactic or utilitarian literature (including, for exam ple, cookbooks and travel guides), as well as children's books.

It is safe to say that the phenom enon of illustration has rarely captured the interest o f scholars in the fields of textual linguistics, literary theory, or even sem iotics, likely owing to the optional nature of the relationship betw een the

7 M ieczysław W allis, "Napisy w obrazach,” in Sztuki i znaki. P ism a sem iotyczne (Warszawa:

Państw ow y Instytut W ydaw niczy, 1983), 191.

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verbal and the visual in such arrangem ents.8 The m atter becom es somewhat more com plicated when we approach the subject of illustrations created by the very author o f the book. This raise s the rather obvious question o f the degree to which we are to treat them as an irremovable p art o f the work, as a “testim ony to the author's interpretation.”9 Yet, even in situations such as the above, the answer is frequently in the negative, as evident in the common editorial practice o f excluding such drawings from the canonical version of a given text.1°

In contem porary literature, however, and particularly in prose, there are in stan ces o f such works in which the function o f the im age is n ot lim ited to illu stratin g the anteceden t, au ton om ou s lin gu istic m e ssag e. We m ay thus p o sit th at the sem iotic statu s of visu al sign s in literary com m unication is ch anging before our eyes. The im age is ceasin g to be an aesth etic addition th at serves m erely to illu strate the con ten ts o f the verbal layer, and is becom ing an integral p art o f the narrative or lyrical m onologue, tak- ing its place in the specific relationship o f com m unication and becom ing another p art o f the various ten sion s involved in the creation o f m eaning.

The phenom enon I intend to exam ine should thus be considered a special case — perh aps a som ew hat peculiar y et sign ifican t and inform ative one

— within the broader problem atics described in term s of the correspond- ences, relatedn ess, influence, tran sp o sition s, and interferences in art.11 It should also be n oted that the last category seem s m o st appropriate in the given context, as we are concerned not with the relationships that emerge from the com parison of the inherent qualities o f individual disciplines, but rather with the consequences o f an incidental juxtaposition, one that leads

8 An interesting attem pt to describe such ties can be found in the study by Frantisek Danes,

"Text a jeho ilustrace," Slovo a slovesnost 56 (2009): 17 4 -18 9 . See also W ysłouch, "Tekst i ilus

tracja," in Literatura a sztuki w izualne (W arszawa: W ydaw nictw o Naukowe PW N, 1994). It is likely apparent that we are now approaching the m atters that constitute the su bject of our attention.

9 W ysłouch, "Ilustracja autorska - casus Brunona Schulza," Teksty Drugie 5 (1992): 120.

10 For an exam ination of this topic, see, for example, W ysłouch, "Tekst i ilustracja"; Jerzy Szyłak, Poetyka komiksu. W arstwa ikoniczna i językow a (Gdańsk: słow o/obraz terytoria, 2000), 15 4 -15 7 .

11 See, for example, Oskar Walzel, "W zajem ne naśw ietlanie się sztuk," in Teoria badań literackich z a g ranicą, ed. Stefania Skw arczyńska, vol. 2, part 1 (Wrocław: W ydaw nictw o Literackie, 1974);

Teresa Cieślikow ska, Janusz Sław iński, eds., Pogranicza i korespondencje sztu k (Wrocław:

Zakład N arodow y im. O ssolińskich, 1980); M ieczysław Porębski, O brazy i zn a k i (Kraków: 1986);

M ary Anne Caw s, The Art o f Interference (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1990); Maryla Hopfinger, W laboratorium sztuki XX wieku. O roli słow a i obrazu (W arszawa: W ydaw nictw o N au

kowe PWN, 1993); Adam Dziadek, O brazy i wiersze. Z zag a d n ień interferencji sztu k w polskiej p o  ezji w spó łczesn ej (Katowice: W ydaw nictw o UŚ, 2004).

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to the overlapping o f two different sy stem s o f sig n s w ithin the sp ace o f a single text.12

O f course, the phenom enon in question is not an entirely new one, nor som e great revolution in how statem en ts are form ed, but rather a growing trend. M easures of this sort rem ained rare for several decades and m ay have app eared to be an iso lated form o f extravagance or a o n e -o ff experim ent that failed to becom e a w idespread or recognizable trend. A m ong the exam- ples that achieved the privileged statu s o f an isolated endeavor m otivated by the particular poetics and them e o f the work were, in the 19 4 0s, the use of original illustrations in A ntoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, and, som ew hat later, in the l9 7 0s, the visual depictions inserted into the narra- tive of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast o f Champions. A separate (and rather sm all) group com prised artists who were profession al drawers, caricaturists, and illustrators such as Roland Topor and Edward Gorey, who attem pted to use their experience in the visu al arts to create exp erim en tal and hum orous narrative texts (Gorey even went as far as to make triviality one of the m ain prem ises o f his aesthetic, known as “Goreyography”)/13 Noteworthy exam - ples o f the use of such strategies in Polish literature can be observed in the achievem ents o f w riters belon ging to the m ilieu know n as “young prose,”

though individual in stan ces can also be found in poetry, even in the output o f authors who are not part of the younger generation (these include Witold W irpsza, author o f Komentarz do fotografii [.A Commentary on Photographs], which binds, into a sin gle w hole, p oem s, p h otograp h s and in scription s, form in g a pecu liar parap h rase o f the old form o f the em blem , and Jacek Durski, w h ose book Uderza Ziemia [Earth Strikes] can actually be classified as either a poetry book or an album o f illu strations). O f course, considering the actu al state o f affairs, it m u st be adm itted th at books o f th is type rem ain a minority, paling in com parison — both in term s o f their number and popularity — to hom ogeneou s lin gu istic m e ssag es, th at is, literature b a se d so lely on the w ritten word. D espite the popu lar conviction about the dom inance of the im age in contem porary culture, it would be difficult to find an abundance o f w orks displayin g such m ultim edia poetics. This

12 On the su bject of the category of interference in art, cf. Dziadek, O brazy i w iersze, 14 -16 .

13 A m ong the younger generation of Polish artists, the one m ost closely associated w ith this group w ould likely be M aciej Sieńczyk, the author of charm ing Hydriola (W arszawa: Lampa i Iskra Boża, 2005), in w hich the exaggerated style of both the verbal narrative and the visual layer serve to evoke a grotesque reality that borders on a hallucinatory play of associations, a surreal, m acabre story, and a pastiche on old-fashioned popular literature. However, the autonom y of the im age is so far-reaching that one doubts w hether the w ork in question can still be considered a literary text.

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is n ot n ecessarily a refutation o f general, sociological, or anthropological diagnoses regarding the condition o f m odern civilization. One m ay assum e, for instance, that the dom inance of the visual is m an ifested in the waning social prestige of literature and the concurrent rise of other m edia, rather than in tran sform ation s occurring within literary discourse itself. On the other hand, our general and academ ic aw areness appears to ascribe sign ifi

cant relevance to various m ulti-coded m essages; even am ong the numerous p rojects devoted to literary theory, there are vocal opinions critical o f the

“verbocen trism ” o f p oetics, as well as calls for the creation o f a m u ltim e

dia literary genology or stylistics.14 Though works that em ploy iconic signs rem ain scarcer than novels or sh ort story collections b ase d exclusively in the m edium o f the word, even these individual, isolated texts are places in which crucial tensions that dynam ise contem porary literature, and even the entire sp ace o f so cial com m unication, are m anifested. There have n ot yet been any in-depth and thorough theoretical studies devoted to the issu e of such intratextual interaction betw een various sign s (despite plenty o f n o

table exam inations of certain p arts and aspects), nor any attem pts to verify general theses through specific analyses, which is why this analysis, which I will attem pt to base on specific exam ples as often as p ossible, can only be considered a superficial recon naissance.15

2.

Let us begin by identifying the textual phenom ena that are to be interpreted a s icons, and by determ ining the initial sem an tic poten tial o f such units.

A s we rem em ber, the iconic sign, according to the definition by C harles S.

Peirce, is an elem ent th at replaces an object for a certain receiver through its resem blance to the object itself, due to certain features shared with that which it signifies (as in the relationship betw een the drawing o f a horse and

14 See, for example, W ysłouch, "W erbocentryzm - uzurpacje i ograniczenia,” in Literatura i s e  miotyka; Edward Balcerzan, "W stronę genologii m ultim edialnej,” in Geno lo gia dzisiaj, eds.

W łodzim ierz Bolecki and Ireneusz Opacki (W arsaw: W ydaw nictw o IBL PAN, 2000); Ewa Szczęsna, "Opowiadanie i m edia,” P am iętnik Literacki 2 (2002).

15 There have been m any more studies devoted to the various w ays of im parting one group of signs w ith features ch aracteristic of other classes of phenom ena, as is the case w ith the p reviously-m entioned aestheticization of the word, visible in carm in a figurata, for instance, and particularly in concrete poetry (see, for example, Piotr Rypson, O braz słow a. Historia poezji w izualnej (W arszawa: Akadem ia Ruchu, 1989); Tadeusz Sław ek, M iędzy literami. Szkice o poezji konkretnej (Wrocław: W ydaw nictw o Dolnośląskie, 1989); W ysłouch, "Od słowa do ornam entu.

Sem iotyczne problem y poezji konkretnej,” in Literatura i semiotyka).

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the signified horse, to u se one of the m o st frequent and trivial exam ples)/16 It is thus som etim es referred to as a representative sign (as its m ain quality is its capacity to represent through im itation, its ability to actualize selected qualities o f the denoted object) or a m otivated sign, in contrast to the arbitrary, conventional sym bol (which include u nits o f a verbal code, am ong others).i7 Such is the role in which drawings are usually included in the text, be they drawn by the author or selected by him (it should be m entioned that not all im ages can be interpreted as iconic signs, which, by their very nature, often represent abstract m eanings, as is the case with the classic exam ple of the “peace dove”). The next group com prises icons th at I would tentatively describe as “utilitarian illustrations,” or various technical or anatom ical cross sections, m aps, and p lan s a s well as m an uals in which the visual elem ent represents a certain action and illustrates a recom m ended method of operation. And, finally, though som ew hat hesitantly, I would include photographs in this list of visual inserts. One should, o f course, keep in m ind that the se- m iotic status o f the photograph rem ains a contentious issu e and th at even Peirce h im self did not treat the photograph as an icon. He believed that the picture, as a product of the optical process of reproduction, retained a direct, physical relationship with its object, and thus, despite the visible likeness, becam e an indexical m ark or situational index.i8 There are, however, argu-

16 A detailed d iscussion of Peirce's theses can be found in Hanna B u czyń ska-G arew icz, Wartość i fakt. Rozw ażania o p ragm atyzm ie (W arszawa: Państwowe W ydaw nictw o Naukowe, 1970) and Z n a k - zn a cze nie - wartość. Szkice o filozofii am erykańskiej (W arszawa: Książka i W iedza, 1975).

The epistem ological aspects of the concept have been explored in Max Bense, Verm ittlung der Realitaten: Sem iotische Erkenntnistheorie (Baden-Baden: A gis-V erlag, 1969). For a critical d is

cussion of the category of likeness as the basis for signification, see W łodzim ierz Ław niczak,

"Uwagi o pojęciu znaku ikonicznego," Studia Sem iotyczne 2 (1971).

17 One should naturally be aware o f the various argum ents raised against the prem ises behind isolating such a category, and particularly of the criticism expressed by Um berto Eco, who regarded the concept of natural likeness as a relic of naive m agical consciousness and attem pted to prove that the perception of a visual analogy is conditioned upon the m astery of perceptive conventions. Images — according to the quoted line of argum ent — thus do not constitute a separate class of motivated representations contrasted w ith arbitrary lingu istic signs, but form, together w ith sym bols, a cohesive repertoire of conventionalized signs.

However, this does not necessarily entail a rejection of the concept itself: Eco, for example, proposes its reinterpretation, recognizing that the iconic sign refers not to the thing itself, but to its perceptual schem a. (Um berto Eco, N ieo b ecn a struktura, trans. Adam Weinsberg, Paw eł Bravo (Warszawa: W ydaw nictw o KR, 1996), 136). See also W ysłouch, "Znak ikoniczny w koncepcji U m berto Eco — now atorstw o i niekonsekw encje," in Literatura i sem iotyka.

18 Charles Sanders Peirce, "What Is a Sign?," in The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writ- ings. V olum e2 (1893-1913), Peirce Edition Project, ed. S. Pierce (Bloom ington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 5-6.

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m ents that allow us to lessen the strictness of this ruling to a certain degree. It is worth noting, for example, that the father of pragm atism focused primarily on photographs created with the snap o f the shutter, pictures that autom ati- cally recorded what happened to appear before the lens, while later artworks often revealed intentional processing, m any form s o f original interference into the process o f autom atic exposure, as well as various levels of sem iotic transform ation o f the photographic im age, consequently weakening the direct, indexical relationship with the object.19 Even if we conclude th at such an im age is a mechanical copy, a replica of the appearance of an object, rather than its visual representation and a unit of sem iosis, it can surely change its sem iotic nature when affected by a particular context, used in a certain state- ment, equipped with communicative intent, and ascribed to a given subjec

tive instance. When integrated into the statem ent, photographs undoubtedly begin to acquire sem antic associations and encourage interpretative activity on the part of the reader, while also indicating the potential object of the reference thanks precisely to this relationship o f likeness, accentuating the iconic potential of the im ages.20 Such a broadening of the scope of the term seem s in line with the m ain current o f Peirce's sem iotics, which links meaning to the pragm atic purpose o f the sign and to a dynamic performance, to processual sem iosis and the effect of the interpretant, rather than a stable arrangement of system ic relationships.21

The issue of the sem antic capacity o f visual sign s has, on multiple occa- sions, been the object of sem antic analysis in the field of literary theory. It has been observed, for example, that of the different varieties of meaning, iconic m e ssag es overw helm ingly em ploy the referential function, or a reference

19 See, for example, Hopfinger, O roli słow a i obrazu, 69.

20 This classification has been accepted by som e scholars. M ieczysław W allis, m entioned above, acknow ledges that "iconic signs are likenesses in the broadest sense: sculptures, paintings, draw ings, illustrations, p h o t o g r a p h s , and films" (W allis, "O znakach szczególnych," in S z

tuki i znaki, 35; em phasis added). See also, for example, Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); Krzysztof O lechnicki, Antropologia obrazu. Fotografia jako metoda, przedm iot i m edium nauk spo łecznych (W arszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, 2003);

Sław om ir Sikora, Fotografia: m iędzy dokum entem a sym bolem (Izabelin: Św iat Literacki, 2004).

21 Peirce, for instance, adm itted that "one and the sam e sign m ay be at once a likeness and an in- dication" ("What Is a Sign?," 8), thus p ractically paving the w ay for an understanding of ico nic

ity, indexicality, and sym bolism as aspects of the sign that are actualized through reception, rather than using them as separate categories of classification applying to the substantial form of the m essage. In result, it becom es a feasible and attractive proposal to associate ico

n icity w ith the mode of reading and to replace the objective nature o f the sign w ith a question about the d ecisions made by the subject, as a result of w hich a given elem ent becom es an icon.

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to the denoted object. For this reason, it m ay even be assum ed that the iconic sign occupies a space som ew here betw een signifying and representation:

while a sym bolic sign profiles the indicated object through its nam e and in

cludes it in a web of recognizable classifications, the iconic sign reproduces the ambivalence of the object, in a sense, not always resolving its actualized categorical mem bership. It is characterized by a certain suspen sion between the poles of im provisation and codification. On the one hand, we know that visual m essages do not have an unam biguously defined dictionary or gram - mar, nor do they refer us to a complete repertoire of discrete units or employ a codified set o f rules governing selection and combination. Due to their in- tegrity, neither drawings nor photographs can be subjected to rigorous mor- phological analysis.22 On the other hand, it is im possible to make an image m ean whatever we w ant it to (as long as we do not arbitrarily im pose on it an entirely external and foreign m eaning with the use o f an inscription, for instance). Iconic m essages, as a num ber o f studies in the field o f sem iotics have shown, rely on general perceptual codes (though these are n ot subject to such strict gram m aticalization as the linguistic system and rather take the form of nebulous connotative repertoires) that select certain qualities of an object as relevant and crucial to the manner in which its identity is captured.

It is precisely this reference to im aginative stereotypes that enables a certain enrichment of the visual signs with more detailed content, while the reduction or elim ination of som e qualities and the em phasizing o f others m akes it possible, to a certain degree, to modify the nature of the references by por- traying an object in one way or another. Another m eans through which dif

ferent shades o f m eaning can be introduced is the style and com position of the depiction: the use o f formulaic imagery, for example, usually leads to the universalization of the reference; by diminishing the features considered to be determ inants of negative or positive connotations, one can degrade or elevate an object; meanwhile, in the realm of suprasegm ental features, certain visual solutions may carry connotations of precision and accuracy of reproduction or a hurried execution and sketchy portrayal; and, finally, at the compositional level, the placem ent of an object on either the left or right side of a field sug- gests either familiarity or new ness.23 All o f these m echanism s, however, rely

22 For more on this subject, see, for example Lalew icz, "Przedstaw ianie i znaczenie. Próba analizy sem iologocznej rysunku (1-2)," Sztuka 4 -5 (1979).

23 See, for example, Rudolf Arnheim , V isual Thinking (Berkeley: U niversity of California Press, 1971); Gunther R. Kress, Theo van Leeuw en, Reading Im ages: The G ram m ar o f V isual D esign (London: Routledge, 1996). Though it does not deal specifically w ith sem antic categories, one should also m ention the sem inal w ork by Ernst Hans Gom brich, Art an d Illusion: A Study in the P sych o lo gy o f PictorialRepresentation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960). The w orks of Roland

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on optional qualities o f im ages and rem ain rather in the realm o f cognitive inclinations or preferences, never achieving the position of obligatory rules and only barely approaching the status of a possible gram m ar of perception.

In result, the icon — according to U m berto Eco — “though recognizable, is always burdened by a certain am biguity and m ore readily denotes general things than it does detailed ones.”24

The above-m entioned privileging of references has occasionally led to the questioning of the efficacy with which iconic signs fulfill other com m unica

tive purposes. M aria Renata M ayenowa claimed, for exam ple, that a “purely iconic m essage is incapable of conveying m etalinguistic information,” which, in her view, w as the cause o f the “fundam ental non-m etaphoricality of iconic sign s.”25 This assertion m ight be true if we were to narrow our perspective to en co m pass only the prim ary m ean in gs evoked by isolated iconic sign s stripped of any communicative context. The question I find m ost interesting, however, is that of the artistic reinterpretation of visual elem ents: determin- ing the functions ascribed to them in literary discourse and demonstrating the way in which they are incorporated into the sem antic structure of the state- ment. Undoubtedly the sim plest and m ost basic m eaning-form ing operation is the recontextualization of the icon, i.e., the placem ent of the visual sign in an unconventional com m unicative context, juxtaposing it with a system of expectations geared tow ards extracting specific messages.26 Treated in this manner, even the sim plest and m ost literal picture can absorb figurative, al- legorical, and m etaphorical m eanings. Our perceptual apparatus, when ap- propriately directed beforehand, dem onstrates a great eagerness to find such features of the received m essage that may turn out to be relevant in a given situation. O f course, in the case of a work of literary art, the role of this regu-

Barthes also occupy an im portant place in the developm ent of the field (for example "Rhetoric of the Image," trans. Stephen Heath, in Im age, M usic, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977; C a m  era Lucid a:R eflection so n Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)).

24 Eco, Nieo b ecn a struktura, 135.

25 Maria Renata Mayenowa, "Porównanie niektórych m ożliw ości tekstów słow nych i w izual

nych ikonicznych," in Studia i rozprawy, eds. Anna Axer and Teresa Dobrzyńska (Warszawa:

W ydaw nictw o IBL PAN, 1993), 176. See also M ichał Porębski, "Czy metaforę można zobaczyć?,"

Teksty 6 (1980).

26 It is w orth m entioning here that there exists a general tendency in sem iotics to tie the se m i

otic statu s of the im age to its use in com m unication. Izydora Dąm bska, for example, claim s that "objects that are im ages of other objects are not eo ipso those objects' signs. [...] Even the im ages that m ost closely resem ble the objects depicted in them only becom e signs of those objects w hen equipped w ith the ability to indicate, signify, or sym bolize them." (Izydora Dąm bska, "O konw encjach sem iotycznych," Studia sem iotyczne 4 (1973): 38 -39 .

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latory context is played by the linguistic tissue of the statem ent, comprising both the propositional m eanings o f each subsequent verbal sequence as well as the stylistic or genre conventions being actualized in a given work. For this reason, icons used in literary discourse should be treated as non-autono- m ous signs, regardless of the “communicative elevation o f the image.”27 Once brought to life, they may in certain cases becom e the active side, reinterpret- ing or even com prom ising the m essage conveyed by the verbal channel, but, in the broader perspective, are subject to strong pressure from the verbal layer of the statem ent. It is mainly the verbal material that unleashes the sem antic potential of the image, gives direction to the processes that create meaning, and rem ains the superior level o f com m unication, the one that determ ines the overall character and identity of the m essage. This structure of dominance w as already observed by Peirce, who em phasized that the image, aside from its ability to reference an object, has very few capabilities with regard to the conveyance o f information. Thus every act of sem iosis m ust combine iconic, indexical, and verbal signs, but “the com plex whole m ay be called a symbol;

for its symbolic, living character is the prevailing one.”28

3.

This pattern appears to find confirm ation even when applied to such radi- cal proposals as the recently published title Produkt polski [Made in Poland] by Sław om ir Shuty.29 This book, which is one big collage com prising an exten

sive selection o f b rief m an ifests, new spaper clippings, bits o f com ic strips, questionnaires, drawings, and photographs, nearly straddles the boundary betw een literary and visual artwork and features surreal humor, often sprin- kled with a pinch of dark comedy. The author rarely (if ever) speaks directly, expressis verbis; he employs irony, creates parodies and pastiches, desem anti- cises words, and autonom ises the iconic layer, but even in this case the verbal layer gives som e degree o f direction to our reading, both in the broader and narrow er scope. Above all else, such elem en ts as the title, the genre clas-

27 Hopfinger, O roli słow a i obrazu, 57.

28 Peirce, "What Is a Sign?," 10. It is telling that in the case of texts in w hich the im age is su b- stantially dom inant, it is often the word that dom inates the im age in term s of function. For example Zbigniew Kloch ("Słowa i obrazy. Kilka uwag o zw iązkach i zależnościach," P am iętnik Literacki 4 (1990)), in his analysis of "visual texts" (the painting and collage) assum es that "the m eanings of these texts cannot be interpreted w ithout referring to verbal codes and the in

form ation conveyed through them" (p. 191) and that to do so requires that "the m essages be included in a web of intertextual relations" (p. 193).

29 Sław om ir Shuty, Produkt Polski (Kraków: Ha!A rt, 2005). Pages not numbered.

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sification (“recycling”) verbally hin ted at by the author, and h is opening rem arks in “Wstęp do konsum pcjonizm u” [“Introduction to C onsum erism ”]

constitute a peculiar set o f coherent instructions that describe the contents of the tom e as a grotesque collection o f im aginative cliches sym ptom atic of the m entality displayed by contem porary Polish society. This is repeated at the level of specific phenom ena, where the presence o f the verbal label frequently lead s to the functional transform ation of the icon. This is not to say that any of the inscriptions serve merely to ground, tautologically repeat, or literally explain the m eaning of the im age. Rather, the verbal sequence plays the role of a catalyst that provokes the reader to form ulate sem antic hypoth- eses and triggers a series of association s without achieving the status o f authoritative com m entary that would unam biguously determ ine the m eaning of a given configuration of signs. The m eanings evoked in this m anner can diverge significantly from the literal sen se of the iconic code, postu lated by M ayenowa, which often vacillates tow ards a quotational m essage. It seem s that the m atter of such m eanings can be found prim arily in a set of connota

tions em bedded in culture and ascribed to the visual conventions in question. There are certain ways of m aking drawings, illustrations, and diagram s that tend to stabilize within a social practice, as a result o f which they often becom e perceived as synecdoches o f their correspondin g realm s o f com- m unication. Selected visual sign s thus acquire a resonance that exceeds the relationship o f likeness, enabling the em ergence o f an iconographic order.

Such an order, in turn, lead s to another reevaluation o f the references in the im age, because, as Eco observes, “in an iconographic code built upon the iconic, the m eanings o f the b asic code becom e the signifiers,”30 which connote certain complex, “culturally localised”31 configurations of a conven- tio n al or even sym bolic nature (when treated as an iconogram , the im age becom es a so rt o f heraldic attribute o f certain phen om ena). Thus, in this case, individual iconic sign s are reproduced, quoted, and subjected to re- contextualisation in such a m anner that they lose their referential dimen- sion, acquiring in ste ad a m etatextu al quality and op eratin g n ot so much a s icon s represen tin g objects, bu t a s em blem atic qu otes from particular poetics, styles, and registers of discourse (individual pictures evoke a s s o ciations with the visual style of ad leaflets, technical schem atics, illustrated m agazines, and kitschy religious pam phlets).

A s these theses m ay sound som ew hat abstract, let us attem pt to illustrate them with the help of specific p assages. At one point in the book, for example,

30 Eco, N ieo b ecn a struktura, 155.

31 Ibid., 158.

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we encounter an anachronistic m ap covering the territory of Poland and its neighboring countries (including part o f the collapsing USSR). The arrows drawn through individual areas give the m ap a strategic air, m aking it resem ble the sorts of illustrations seen in historical atlases, ones depicting the courses o f fam ous historical battles. Only by reading the title and legend do we discover that we are looking at a chart depicting the Flooding [of the region]

with cheap clothing from the People'sRepublic ofChina and the former USSR, with main outdoor markets as the locations of the landm ark battles. It is therefore the lin- guistic text that determines the reference of the arrangement, while the iconic part — via cultural connotations — adds a humorous, mock-heroic interpre- tation of the denoted object. Meanwhile, in the miniature Polish Karate,32 a se

ries of illustrations depicting a person sitting or standing in various positions, one can find in the plane of denotation a representation o f a number of rather sim ple physical exercises, evoking in the sphere of connotations associations with popular instructions and booklets on health, fitness, and hygiene33:

32 Ibid.

33 Shuty, Produkt Polski.

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It is only the series of captions that point to an interpretation ofthe pictographs as illustrations of the suffering experienced by a typical Pole as a result of alcohol overconsum ption, allowing us to treat the whole as an ironic and satirical take on stereotypes regarding social mores. Just as I proposed above, we would not find in the presented series o f illustrations any subtext associated with Polish custom s were it not for the textual com plem ent: the verbal com m entary im poses this connection onto the formulaic drawings, compel- ling us to perceive them in a new context. At the sam e tim e, these im ages are not an inert, malleable body that succumbs to linguistic instructions. It is precisely the connotative potential of the iconic layer that im plies the standard, normative nature of the depicted behavior. The analytical disassem bling of the simple, trivial — perhaps even em barrassing — action into a series of visual em blem s becom es one source of comedy in the statem ent, com pounded further by the contrast between the anticipated dynamism (karate) and the static nature o f the depiction. At the sam e tim e, the program m atic, instructional nature of publications that use a sim ilar iconographic convention creates the illusion of scientific restraint, making room for an ironic sense of detachment.

A s a whole, the visual elem ents serve prim arily as characteristic exempla of what we might call individual iconographic subcodes, as prefabricated cliches and connotative m edia for ingrained social mythologies.

4 ^.

Shuty's text is incoherent by design and, as such, is paradoxically easy to re- duce by grasping the rules behind the collection of cliches, paraphrases, and quotes that govern the entire work. It is, however, possible to integrate more tightly the iconic enclaves with the m ain stream o f the statem ent by grant- ing them a prom inent place in the overall organization o f m eaning. Such a solution app ears to be particularly interesting, as it lead s u s beyond the borders o f the individual sign and enables the observer to reconstruct the m eaning-creating strategies inscribed into the text.34 I would like to illustrate this possibility by exam ining Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, m entioned above. The b o o k s draw ings are woven into the plot and tightly integrated into the linguistic layer (not as a parallel series, but through hypotactic hier- archisation) and are preceded each tim e by a indexical gesture by the author,

34 Due to lim ited space, I will m erely m ention the possib ility o f the existence of interm ediate states, such as w hen a separate illustrated insert is included in a digressive narrative text.

In the novel Podręcznik do Ludzi (Warszawa: W .A.B., 1996), the narrative is interspersed w ith illustrations depicting tarot cards and reproductions of several paintings, and is preceded by a short series of hum orous draw ings by the author.

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for exam ple: “It w as daytime outside, and there w as a clock in the tower. The clock looked like this:

The professor w as stripped down to his candy-striped underw ear shorts and his socks and garters and his m o rtar-b o ard ...”35

In each of these cases we encounter an obvious duplication of the signification using two codes to represent the sam e p arts of the depicted world. Two things im m ediately draw our attention: first, the peculiar tautological nature o f such an arrangement, one that does not result in a more detailed reference, but is instead lim ited to an intersem iotic translation of the references; and second, the incidental nature of this measure, or the lack of clearly perceptible criteria according to which the objects subjected to double signification were selected. We cannot say that there is any particular category o f phenom ena th at forced the author to em ploy visual elem ents, nor can we indicate any repeatable, typified context that would provoke him to use sem iotic pairs.

The ostentatious disruption of the rules of textual autonom y through the com plication of the m essage without providing any tangible increase in inform ation, thus violating Grice's m axim of quantity, prom pts us to search for a m otivation for this arrangem ent in the area of im plied m eanings (not un- like in previous exam ples, graspin g the sen se of the configuration requires ingenuity and interpretative activity on the part of the reader). If one seeks such im plicit justifications, one should also note the disillusioning effect of such iconic enclaves, in which the clash of codes exposes the conventional- ity of the story and the m ateriality o f the text (as an arrangem ent of signifying graphem es), disorganizing the flow o f m eanings and m aking room for alternative approaches to the subject. Such parabases, as Paul de M an might say, introduce elem ents o f an am biguous, am bivalent visu al code into the

35 Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast o f Cham pion s (New York: RosettaBooks, 2010), 52.

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coherent linguistic statem ent, in a sense exposing the gap betw een the word and the thing, docum enting the resistan ce o f factuality again st sem iosis.

The addition of iconic supplem en ts su ggests th at language, as a narrative tool, is incapable o f actually and definitively correspond in g to its object, a s there rem ain exp an ses o f m alleability and in com p leten ess stretching out at the m argin s o f the message.36 In other words, the arbitrary series of iconic sign s in the text of the novel encourages u s to su sp en d our belief in the validity o f the categories upon which the narrative is founded and pro

vides a sense o f ironic detachm ent v is-a-v is existing structures, indicating the cognitive lim itations o f the story. By em ploying such aw kward draw ings, Vonnegut in a sense “p eels” objects o f their m eanings, thus distancing h im self from culturally-sanctioned signs, which are incapable of conveying critical m essages. This is not about the invalidation or destruction o f meaning, but rather ironic am bivalence: for a statem en t to exist, it m u st confirm and assim ilate the m odel o f the world that is ingrained in language, but, at the sam e, it expresses a critical aw areness while retaining a certain m argin of leeway indicated by the unpredictable changes in the sem iotic register.”

From this perspective, the above-m entioned irregularity and incidentalness of the illustrative interjections, which form no series, are justified as a specific form of m acrosign, one that repeats, within the arrangem ent of the text, the haphazardness o f being, which eludes the control of the sym bolic order.

One could say th at the subject retains a skeptical distrust of the authority of the discourse, yet fails to provide any opposing order; it is b ase d merely on its inability to fit in, a resu lt o f the in cid en taln ess and individuality of this specific being.

And one brief, final com m ent on this m atter: in this instance, it is worth m entioning certain additional circum stances that could serve as meaning- ful clues to support the proposed interpretation. First, I would like to point out that ironic reduction is generally one o f the m ain defining m echanism s of the rhetorical strategy em ployed in the novel. There are p assages that play a sim ilar role to that of the visual representations by, for exam ple, referring the reader to the perspective of a naive observer through a reduction of the language to a behavioristic description of physical data, which, as in the case

36 Som e critics (see, for example, Charles Russell, "The Vault of Language: Self-R eflective Artifice in Contem porary Am erican Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies 20 (1974)) were w illing to consider the "distance betw een words and phenom ena" (ibid., 351) as one of the m ain d eterm inants of the artistic form ation represented by the likes o f Vonnegut.

37 Com pare this passage w ith the interpretation of Vonnegut's novels as exam ples of a particular affirm ative parodical practice that explores the lim its of "forms of m eaningful action" in the study by Harriet and Irving Deer, "Satire as Rhetorical Play," B oundary 5 (1977): 7 11-7 2 2 .

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o f the visual depiction, cleans the object of any perceptive traces and meanings added through the process of social sem iosis.38 The revolver, for instance, is torn from the realm of m oralistic rhetoric and persuasive aestheticization through both an iconic recoding and the use of a na'ive definition: “This w as a tool w hose only purpose w as to m ake holes in hum an beings.”39 Second, the su pposition regarding the dem ythologizing quality o f the im age is also encouraged by the infantile visual style of the author's drawings. The desta- bilization of the narrative code is thus accom plished with the support of the potential within the code itself, while the questioning of existing stereotypes occurs by exploiting the stereotype that grants the childlike gaze the ability to discover that the em peror has no clothes. Nevertheless, iconic signs seem particularly predestined to sem iotic sabotage, as they belong to the category o f “w eak” codes (m aintaining, som e w ould claim , the statu s o f a sem iotic hypothesis) and do not result in an alternative categorization o f phenom - ena, but rather — by relying on likeness (even if it is conventionalized) rather than classification — merely indicate semiotic potentiality, encouraging many com peting perspectives on the object.

The im age is thus highly privileged as a sign that rem ains closer to reality, more neutral than the word, and, by the sam e token, less susceptible to symbolic abuse and falsification. This characterization o f different types o f signs, however, is conditioned upon the narrative strategy, which is associated with a specific axiological perspective. Vonnegut's novel clearly elevates the realm of the som atic experiences of the common man, who — to borrow a term from a M orris Dickstein essay — “knows in his gut that all ideals”40 are worthless and treats them as abstract hy p ostases.41 In th is prose, the lofty id eas and accom plishm ents of “high” culture are predom inantly depicted in burlesque tones, while the perception of the direct, everyday experience is treated as the

38 Th is quality has been observed by critics and recognised as one of the m ost im portant features of the w riter's style. See, for example, Morris Dickstein's rem arks on the "flat and factual”

tone of Vonnegut's novels, w hich serves to paint an image of a (som etim es irritating, by the critic's own adm ission) "wise sim pleton” ("Black Hum or and History: Fiction in the Sixties,”

Partisan Review 43.2 (1976): 197).

39 Vonnegut, B re a k fa sto f Ch am pions, 47.

40 Dickstein, "Black Hum or and History,” 191.

41 One m ight safely include Vonnegut am ong the circle of w riters that value the areas of the "material bodily lower stratum ” (a term I borrow from Bakhtin) and explore a q uasi-carnivalesque inversion of hierarchies. Th is assum ption finds support in the first of the bi-co d al interjections, one that contains a m anifest o f sorts: "To give an idea of the m aturity of m y illustrations for this book, here is m y picture of an asshole” (Vonnegut, Breakfast o f Cham pions, 13).

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only relatively effective shield again st the destructive effects o f social mythologies and cultural alienation.

A com pletely different relationship can be observed betw een the word and the im age in the case of a literary work that refers to a som ew hat differ

ent world view. The particular use of drawings in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince“2 essentially results in the questioning o f iconicity as a mode o f representation.43 The im position o f a particular reference onto arbitrary pictographs tears the relationship o f likeness from its objective anchors and essentially m akes the reference conditional on subjective perceptions and the unrestrained choices o f the subject. Thus the analogous nature of the image, which stabilizes the phenom enon in its given form, gives way to provisional asso ciatio n s and dynam ic sym bolic relationships. On the other hand, the individual sign, while retaining its uniform substantive form , can becom e a space in which alternative interpretations collide, appearing, for example, as either a snake or a hat““ (incidentally, the author employs the sam e mecha- nism of aspectual perception and gradable iconicity demonstrated by Ludwig W ittgenstein in his fam ou s d u ck -rab b it drawing). It is worth noting that, in this case, the im age operates sim ilarly to sym bolic signata, as it is subject to a certain homonymy that conditions its sem antic fulfillment on the action of the verbal context and communicative environment.

Yet the questioning o f signification through likeness in The Little Prince goes even further. In the fam ous p assage involving the drawing o f a sheep, subsequent illustrations o f the supposed anim al are rejected — in the course o f negotiations betw een the narrator and the character — as failed, unsuccessful representations that obscure the individual nature of the original and artificially force its unique qualities into the m old o f w ell-w orn perceptual cliches.45 When a depiction is finally accepted, it is one that does not involve obvious analogies, and m erely alludes to the very existence o f its model.

Considering the parabolic nature of the work, we m ay look for more general prem ises behind such a decision and understand the semiotic gam e described above as a pretext for sketching a certain anthropological design. The narrative o f the book derives its dynam ics from the tension betw een the desire to sem iotically represent the Other (the sheep, in this case) and the fear of alienating appropriation. Actual representation thus turns out to be possible

42 Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince (Ware: W ordsw orth C lassics, 1995).

43 In this passage I make use of the inspiring rem arks of Prof. Teresa Dobrzyńska and Prof. Albena Chranova.

44 de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, 10.

45 Ibid., 14.

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only when we abandon the creation of im ages o f the Other and the reification o f its qualities through a specific visual characterization, and merely outline the space in which this Other could spontaneously present itself, unbridled by our expectations and perceptions. In result, the visual code is harnessed by the narrative com m entary into perform ing an iconoclastic function and, paradoxically, is turned against itself. The iconic elements dispersed through- out the book form an arrangem ent o f negated sign s that are sum m oned, in a sense, as exam ples and criticised as blunt objects associated with the op- pressive power of the gaze.

5.

It could thus be assum ed that Breakfast of Champions and The Little Prince each represent radically opposite narrative strategies: from the privileging of the im age as a substitute for experience, to the critique o f iconic likenesses as a specific form of reification. Between these two clearly polarized perspectives there can also be found certain interm ediate solutions involving a more am- bivalent approach to visual representation. One exam ple o f such an ambigu- ous stance is the latest (and, according to the subtitle, “illustrated”) novel by Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,116 which problem atizes the very opposition between iconic and symbolic signs. The author (quoted above as an expert in the field in question, and now appearing as the object of our analysis) tells the story of the antiquarian book seller Yambo who suffers par- tial m em ory loss as the result of an accident, retaining only his encyclopedic knowledge while losing all ties with personal m em ories. In an attem pt to re- cover his lost identity, he spends his days poring over the books o f his child- hood, searching for any fam iliar signals that could reify his p ast experiences.

Because visual m essages com prise a m ajority o f the texts read by the author, and are included as reproductions in the novel itself, the narrative eventually turns into an elaborate essay on the multiple m eanings of the cited im ages.

This discursive section of the book is so expansive that the im ages used within

— among them encyclopedia illustrations, postage stam ps, posters, postcards, comics, the covers of adventure novels, propaganda leaflets, etc. — focuses the m ajority o f the reader's attention for an extended period o f tim e and nearly rises to the rank o f the m ain p rotagon ist o f the story (this expansive com m entary w as in fact the reason for the book's lukew arm reception am ong som e o f the critics, who com plained about the less-than-coherent connection betw een the analysis and the plot, the privileged position o f sem iotics

46 Um berto Eco, The M ysterious Flam e o f Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel, trans. Geoffrey Brock (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005).

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at the expense of the narrative, and the rather unsuccessful disguising of the implicit autobiographical dim ension of the investigations).

In subsequent chapters, Eco presents his readers with more illustrations, clippings, and reproductions that make up the home archive of the m ain char

acter (and, at the sam e tim e, the narrator, and probably that o f the author's own spokesman), while also displaying the cultural determinants of the image and the myriad ways in which it is entangled in the realm o f social discourses and notions. The m eaning of individual visual representations cannot be de- duced on the b asis o f purely optical sim ilarities, but rather, as it turns out in alm ost every instance, based on their dependence on various codes, customs, stereotypes, ideologies, and, finally, the circum stances o f their reception.47 The sem iotic reinterpretation o f sim ilar sign s begin s with the very first illustration, in which the m ain character attem pts to depict Napoleon, at the request of a doctor. 48

A s it turns out, the likeness o f the fam ou s em peror bears m ore resem - blance to a pictograph of sorts rather than a faithful portrait, as it refers not to a “natural likeness,” to the visual qualities o f the object, bu t rather to the

47 The peculiar "discursivisation” of the im ages appears to be aided by the fact that in Eco's work all visual interjections are narratively m otivated by the conditions in w hich the text is read and, by the sam e token, are in a sense subordinated by the speech of the narrator who de- codes their m eaning (in contrast to Vonnegut's novels, in w h ich im ages are introduced based on the author's arbitrary decisions and w here representation is conditioned upon the m odula- tions of the com m unication channel).

48 Eco, The M ysterious Flam e o f Queen Loana, 23.

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attributes that stem from our knowledge of the subject, attributes ingrained in our sem antic memory. Thus, this is a typical exam ple illustrating Eco's theoretical thesis, which states that:

if an iconic sign shares attributes with something, it is not with the object itself, but with the model that governs our perception of the object; it is constructable and recognizable through the sam e thought processes that we undertake to construct a given concept, regardless of the substance in which the mutual relationship materialises.49

Here the author assists the reader in this task by having one of the characters explain the significance o f the event: “You drew your m ental schem e o f N a

poleon — the tricorne, the hand in the vest.”50

Elsewhere, the change in the context of the reading produces a significant shift in its connotation: for exam ple, a visually-m otivated likeness is called into question in the case o f a postage stam p collection. The im ages reproduced in this passage could essentially be regarded as iconic representations o f various exotic p laces or lan d scap es (“the h o u ses o f Baghdad,” “a Guate- m alan landscape,” “a map of the Fiji islan d s”5i), as nearly ideal realizations of visual signs. Yet the narrator clearly em phasizes that for him, they make up a phantasm atic im aginarium , a “receptacle o f oneiric im ages” rooted in his personal obsession s. N ot representing any objects fam iliar to him through his own experience, the sign s signified prim arily though association s with the books o f his youth, with the world depicted in adventure novels, and by belonging to the reality o f the characters youthful dream s and notions. The pictures on the stam ps thus refer to written texts, to popular stories and stereotypes of exoticism, and also to private association s and im agined representations. Multiple references are cited, yet none form any stable, motivated relationship, none achieve the status of an objective model. This contextual approach to the m eanings o f an im age m akes is articulated m o st evidently when the narrative focuses on propaganda m essages dating back to the period in which the dominant ideology was that of fascism . The writer demonstrates, for example, how postcards bearing caricatures o f Jews and Blacks reinforced racist prejudices by exploiting popular notions about the natural motivation behind the image.52

49 Eco, N ieo b ecn a struktura, 136.

50 Eco, The M ysterious Flam e o f Queen Loana, 22.

51 Ibid., 254, 256.

52 Ibid., 188.

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Only when confronted w ith specific w artim e experiences and the circum stances following the war do the characters in the novel verify their pre - vious notions, perceiving the inadequacy of well-known im ages and discov- ering the striking dissim ilarity betw een the sign and the apparen t model.

The recognizability of the im age turns out to be not so much a derivative of the sim ple, sp on tan eo u s perception o f visu al stim uli as it is a function o f certain beliefs that shape reality in a specific m anner.53 One can easily no- tice that, despite their variety, in all of these cases the attention of the writer is rarely directed tow ards individual iconic sign s (nevertheless treated as

“se m ata” belon ging to different perceptual codes th at do n ot refer to any supposed natural likeness), focusing instead on iconogram s, or codified arrangem ents of signifiers that connote certain w ebs of n otions and convic- tions. Their decipherm ent occurs through a peculiar form of “deiconisation”

of the im ages while reading, which in turn reveals their conventionalized, quasi-sym bolic sem an tic status.

53 This naturally raises the question of the interventional role of a narrative strategy that is ap- parently intended to be an im plem entation of the "semiotic guerrilla warfare" proposed by Eco: "to change the circum stances influencing the readers' choice of the code governing their reception.” (N ieobecna struktura, 4 0 6-40 7). Such an interpretation allows us to treat The M ys- terious Flam e o f Queen Loana as a novelistic illustration of the author's theoretical postulates.

This, however, does not exhaust the issue, as the cited representations are additionally tied up in the dialects of truth and pretense, decadence and vitality, representation and ineffability.

I will not explore this su bject further, due to a lack of space.

(23)

6.

In the last three novels m entioned above, we w itn ess the near rem oval or, to use a more careful term, the neutralisation of the icon's prim ary meanings, the m arginalization o f the referential association, which becom es pretextual and incidental. However, the series o f visual representations is u sed in such a way that, w ithout changing its denotation, it becom es a m edium for new m eanings that emerge from the overall structure o f the m essage. It can thus be assum ed that it is not the iconic sign itself, but the m anner in which it is u sed in a given context, that co-creates the m eaning of the m essage. A similar pattern can nevertheless be observed, though likely to a lesser extent, in all o f the other literary works m entioned. Practically none o f the exam ples dis- cussed above em phasize the purely artistic qualities of the icon, which does n ot serve a pictorial purpose in the traditional sen se, nor does it affect us with its visual qualities, but instead enters an abstract gam e of concepts, thus becom ing a m edium for categorical qualifications and stereotypical cultural characterisation. Only superficially do the cited im ages resem ble traditional illustrations: the form er differ from the latter in th at they do n ot serve any autonom ous aesthetic or representative function, and are thus by definition essentially devoid of any particular artistic value. They do n ot explain their purpose in the mim etic plane of representation nor in the context of the pic

torial conventions th at govern contem porary art, and elude description in term s of art criticism or history. They do, however, belong to a greater seman- tic complex in which objective references are dom inated by m etatextual and pragm atic m eanings. Rather, the direction o f such sem anticisation is deter- m ined mainly by the m anner in which the drawings are com bined with the verbal layer, through the use o f explicitly expressed content, stylistic devices, and com positional choices. It is this linguistic context of the iconic interjections — their “verbal interpretant”5“ — that enables us to guess which of the connotations o f the likeness in question will be relevant and u sefal within the frame of a given m essage. The word also allows us to specify the communicative status of content connoted in this manner, as well as its hierarchical position and m odal characteristics (which determine, for example, whether given signs should be treated as the authoritative m edia o f narration, traces o f the author's own presence, or quotes from the popular iconosphere that have been subjected to critical reflection). Once processed in this manner, the im age ceases to be a mere likeness, a sim ple “view of a thing,”55 and becom es a m edium for diverse information, a textual phenom enon of sorts.

54 Maria Poprzęcka, C z a s wyobrażony. O sposobach opow iadania w polskim m alarstw ie XIX wieku (W arszawa: W ydaw nictw a U niw ersytetu W arszaw skiego, 1986), 67.

55 I borrow this apt phrase from Szyłak, Poetyka komiksu, 23.

Where Codes Meet: On the Literary Uses of Iconic Signs

Where Codes Meet: On the Literary Uses of Iconic Signs

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